Procol Harum

Beyond
the Pale

Keith Reid at Rutgers
University

Greg Panfile

In 1971 or so I had the privilege of studying Modern Poetry
with Alicia Ostriker at Rutgers University. Alicia was a poet in
her own right and a pretty good critic as well, chain-smoked and
wore miniskirts and long hair, very much in a sort of academic /
Beatnik tradition. The material we studied was what you'd expect,
TS Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Leroi Baraka / Jones, Sylvia Plath. And
of course the students in the permissive' atmosphere of the time
were given the opportunity, if they so chose, to teach one class
each on some modern poet they liked.

The only other person I can recall chose Mose Allison and his
extremely pessimistic jazz / blues. The lyrics were a riot, very
comic and very dark, sort of Lenny Bruce set to a slow twelve-bar,
over and over and over.

I, of course, as you have by now deduced, chose Keith Reid's
Procol Harum lyrics. This was definitely in a time-frame where Broken
Barricades was the latest album, but Grand Hotel had
not yet appeared. In honor of both Alicia's miniskirts and my
relationship with a certain long-haired blonde student, I managed
to include Luskus Delph as an example of something or
other.

It was so long ago, that in order to reproduce the lyrics for
all I had to type them on to mimeograph ... I recall making
really obvious comparisons like Whaling Stories to The
Waste Land, and A Salty Dog to The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner (on acid), things like that. Still
There'll Be More I likened to the ancient insult poetry of
the Roman poet Martial.

This particular class was taught in a set of rooms on the very
bottom floor of a dormitory, with the paper-thin prefabricated
nature of most such ticky-tacky Sixties construction. Thus the
foreign-accented professor who was teaching Physics 101 to pocket-protected
future employees of Dow Chemical seemed to have a constant
problem with the volume of my presentation ... this probably had
something to do with me piping my turntable through a Fender
Bassman amp with two 12-inch speakers. I was a bass player at the
time and couldn't afford a stereo ... twenty-five years later I
read in my alumni newsletter of someone recalling the sound of
Cream's Sunshine of Your Love blasting out of the very
dormitory where I lived ... hey, that was me, dude, I had to
practise.

Of course I got an A on the thing, mostly for having I think
the guts to do something so bizarre, and marching out the proper
big words and literary associations and whatnot. Alicia had two
sort of I think interesting attitudes in response ... one, she
was struck by the 'harshness' of the sound ... now, granted,
Robin put out some rather nasty sounds, but PH as a whole was
pretty mellifluous relative to a lot of the other rock around.
Must have been that beatnik background, bongos and automatic
writing and all that stuff.

The other thing she noted in both my presentation and the Mose
Allison one was the pessimism, realism, cynicism, ... whatever
you want to call it ... lack of optimistic naiveté and belief in
whatever. I guess she must have really liked the flower-children
period, and had hoped that somehow this generation would be able
to do something impossible like change human nature and repair
the world. But this was after Altamont, Hendrix and Joplin dead,
the murders at Kent State and so many years of futile resistance
to the war in Vietnam. To me and many others, by this time, the
dark predilections of Keith Reid seemed to be more in tune with
what was actually happening than the perhaps sincere but
certainly unrealistic views from the last few remaining hippies
in the Joni Mitchell / CSNY mode.

Other tunes I recall discussing the lyrics to include Nothing
That I Didn't Know and The Dead Man's Dream. To
someone who was 12 when the schoolgirls were crying at recess
during the Cuban Missile Crisis while waiting for the clouds to
turn mushroom, who had practised hiding under his desk in first
grade in preparation for global thermo-nuclear warfare, and seen
his contemporaries die at an early age both at home and away in
pursuit of whatever the American establishment was chasing in
Vietnam ... death was something all too real that could happen to
anyone at any time. Worse, it was random and arbitrary,
meaningless, as best exemplified by that wonderful lottery they
held: the beautiful irony of basing it on one's date of birth.

Something about the 'sweetness of melancholy' in Keith's
lyrics and Gary / Matthew's music seemed to deal with that and
resolve it in some way as something you had to cope with, but
were better able to deal with once it was accurately described
... Peter Handke has written better than I and at great length
about this subject.

Somewhat bizarre in a Kafkaesque hunger-artist sense is the
notion of dealing with such matters poetically, and then
packaging the result as a form of 'entertainment' in competition
with the mindless oral fixations of the Sugar Sugar, Yummy
Yummy Yummy, and Chewy Chewy songs of the world. We
– 'my generation' – were certainly weird at times,
inefficient, unrealistic, whatever you want to call it. But
certainly a major part of our problem / attitude was the
unremitting, totally-unacknowledged weirdness of the standard
consensus reality we were expected to accept, and even give our
lives for, just on some greybeard loon's say-so.

Greg Panfile, author of
the above, has been published in various publications including Beatlefan,
Excitations, Off the Beatle Track, and the 910 Magazine.
Some of his essays are available here;
'Beyond the Pale' briefly reviews his albums Resolution and Inferno; he writes about
meeting Procol Harum here.